Johanna Love: Under a darkening sky

About

Artist Johanna Love combines laser-etching, print, drawing and photographic languages to create unstable, shifting material surfaces and visually unfathomable images. In a new series of work titled ‘The last of the light’ found images of landscape combine with scientific images of dust particles, gathered from the artist’s grandmother’s home in Hamburg, Germany, a city heavily bombed during World War II, and created in collaboration with The Natural History Museum, London. Through the work dust becomes a metaphor for memory, a physical archive of time and place.

Love’s work moves between image and object; layers remain continually incomplete, revealing and hiding, almost falling apart then coming together again. Cut and drawn paper unfolds to suggest open pages of an unreadable book, inviting imagination whilst suggesting a dark history. The paper physically suffers through the etching process, yet it is also celebrating its own materiality.

Love is an artist and academic living in London, UK. Her practice explores images that sit at the intersection between traditional problems of perception and modern technology, images that are at the edge of visual representation and provoke a number of paradoxical readings. Fractured, open and complex images offer an arena within which to contemplate themes of time, memory and mortality.

Johanna Love is a Pathway Leader for MA Printmaking at Camberwell College of Arts and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Printmaking at the University of Brighton. In 2013 she attained a PhD in the field of Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, with a thesis titled Dust: Exploring the relationship between contemporary modes of viewing the photographic printed image. She completed a fellowship in Printmaking at The Royal Academy Schools between 2001-5.  Love exhibits widely both nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include: New Vision of Printmaking, Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, TNUA (Taipei National University of the Arts) and Complutense University of Madrid (2017); Johanna Love, Bentlage Druckvereinigung, Germany (2018); Another Way of Telling, Vancouver, Canada (2016); Johanna Love, GiG Gallery, Munich (2015); Lichtlose Luft, ParcSpace, London College of Communication (2016); A small constellation of photographic evidence, Cheng Art Gallery, Beijing (2015); Behind the eyes: making pictures, Gallery North, Newcastle (2013); British Printmaking Japan, Kyoto Museum & Art